On view through March 2008 at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles, Lauren Bon’s Bees and Meat should not be missed. Lauren Bon is the artist behind Not a Cornfield, a large installation of an actual cornfield in downtown LA. Bees and Meat is her first body of new work since Cornfield. We got a chance to hear Lauren Bon speak and love her playful (and at times spooky) pursuits.

The L.A. County Museum of Art used to be a hard nut to crack: a huge complex of windowless concrete where the front entrance was never clearly defined and the hodgepodge of its various buildings had no clear order. Although I’ve been to the museum countless times, I never once have had the sense that I’d gotten a comprehensive overview of everything that’s there.

Now that the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum is open on LACMA’s sprawling campus (is it considered part of LACMA itself? I’m unclear on that), I was curious to see how the Renzo Piano building full of Eli Broad’s consistently cheerful and LA-centric loaner collection might change the experience of the museum as a whole. And, well, now it’s definitely clear what is considered the main entrance. Chris Burden’s light-posts, Charles Ray’s great riff on the old Ruscha’s LACMA-is-burning gag, and the first of the many, many Koons pieces that dominate Broad’s collection surround a portico with the ticket counter that is now sandwiched between the old museum and the new.

As far as the rest of LACMA goes, I’m concerned that it will be a challenge to get patrons back over to the main campus now that a firetruck and shiny tulips point the way to Piano’s gigantic escalator to the third floor of Broad’s flashy storage house.

And it is most definitely Mr. Broad’s museum: each floor is stamped with a gaudy glass plaque near the elevator featuring a stock photo of the Mr. and Mrs. and a carefully worded explanation of the tenuous state of the collections’ ownership. Reading between the lines, even with no background information (like one person in our party), it is easy to parse out the institutional tug-of-war between Broad and the museums of Los Angeles in that paragraph of text.

There are some odd features of this museum: it’s a top-down affair, with the escalator ferrying patrons to the third floor and straight into an altar to Jeff Koons. The over-sized elevator, which descends through Barbara Kruger text, has a hastily added bar that cordons off the majority of the floor space, because it can’t handle the weight if as many people as will fit in the elevator all pile in together. The first floor is poorly lit and just a couple of Serras, and by the time you’ve reached the bottom, it’s about as anti-climatic as Richard Serra could possibly get.

But the collection, of course, is the art equivalent of walking through the pages of the Oscar issue of People magazine: it’s an all-star extravaganza and everything is dressed up to its show-stopping best. Basketballs? Check. Michael Jackson and Chimp? Check. Silver Mozart? Cindy’s circus? Hirst’s butterflies? Check, check, check. It’s all there, flooded in the natural sunlight that made California an artist’s haven in the first place.

I guess I’d have to say in that somehow it all works: like some twisted strange starry-eyed soap-opera befitting Hollywood.

Tomorrow — if the coming storm doesn’t stop us — we’re on a plane to the City of Angels to install our show at Whittier College (opens on Thur, Feb 28, from 7-9pm). As usual, we’ll be blogging our process here.

We’ve got a pair of tickets to give away to the April 13th performance of Tristan at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (8pm). If you’d like a chance to win the tickets, email us or leave your name in the comments by Friday, March 16th. We’ll enter all the names in a hat and draw a random winner for the tickets (currently selling for $173 to $398 dollars per ticket). The tickets will be waiting for the winner at Will Call on the day of the performance.

“Tristan und Isolde is a tale of a love so overwhelming and intense it transcends mortal bounds. This project represents an exciting opportunity to collaborate with fellow artists Peter Sellars and Esa-Pekka Salonen, to explore and draw fresh inspiration from both the story and the great creative work of Richard Wagner, and to re-tell this medieval myth of timeless significance and universal relevance,” Bill Viola says.

Last night we drove over to Fulton to see our friend Justin Merritt’s band Psalters. Traveling in a grease powered/art covered school bus, the Psalters are on a never-ending tour. By day they beg for discarded restaurant grease, by night they create a transcending mix of Tom Waits and old-time gospel with an eclectic group of instruments, including Justin’s hand-made hurdy-gurdy.

Have you been following the hype about Banksy’sBarely Legal show up right now in LA? Painted elephant, animal rights violations, Brangelina… behind all the hubbub is some art worth seeing. But if you want to, you better hurry. It’s a three-day run that closes today.

Barely Legal
Hunter St, Los Angeles
Sept. 15-17, 12-8pm

Hunter Street is off Santa Fe, two blocks from the freeway.

If you can’t make it out there in time, Kozyndan were at the opening and have a review with lots of comments here, and Jamie O’Shea at Supertouch has loads of great images here.

We stopped between LA and San Jose for cherries, plums, and apricots from a fruit stand. Later, we found an Indian restaurant near eBay headquarters that called itself the “confluence of Silicon Valley professionals”: the palaak paneer was especially good.

The panels yesterday were mostly technical, and I learned about add-ons and plug-ins, the “10 types of web-writing,” how to build your audience, the history of Flickr and Blogger. There are 750 women bloggers here, and we are being courted with test drives in hybrids, calcium-infused water, Starbucks coffee, and introductions to everything and everyone.

Today is the more cultural side of blogging, and I am looking forward to panels on edu-blogging, political blogging, identity and obligations, and the afore-mentioned panel on art blogging.